(Apologies if this shows up on the list twice... but my first posting
seems to have gotten lost.)

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Michael Chean wrote:

> My experience also parallels Jerome's.  Because of my inexperience I am not
> a very strong advocate for Smalltalk, but just the task of convincing my
> engineer friends to look outside their comfort zone has proven impossible.
> My friend at JPL considers Smalltalk as having missed the boat, which seems
> to be the case.  When I mentioned that I was following this list he
> suggested I look at Tcl/Tk instead.

I've actually been using Tcl/Tk as my primary development language at work
for the last couple of years, and I can tell you that Smalltalk is still
vastly superior as a general-purpose programming language.

Tcl/Tk has its good points... mostly Tk, actually.  It's arguably slightly
better than Smalltalk for writing very small GUI applications, because you
can just write a short script.  For medium to large GUI applications, the
power/flexibility of the language becomes more important, and Smalltalk
wins hands down in terms of development time and maintainability.

Smalltalk (especially Squeak) is also more fun.  Although Tcl/Tk is still
relatively fun compared with something like C++. :-)

There are other factors to consider... for example, if your application
requires a UI with 100% MS Windows look & feel, Squeak probably wouldn't
work (yet), although a few of the other Smalltalks would.  It's certainly
possible to create a reasonably professional UI with Squeak, though... I
recently worked on a commercial project with Squeak which accomplished
this.  (Speaking of which, I made some enhancements to the "BobsUI" UI
framework which I've been meaning to release shortly.)

If your app just needs to spit out html as a web server, Squeak would be
great for that.

It's a little odd that your friend mentioned Tcl/Tk as an alternative to
something that "missed the boat", as it doesn't really have any greater
overall mindshare than Smalltalk.  (E.g., if you search monster.com, you
will see a similar number of Smalltalk and Tcl/Tk job postings.)

- Doug Way
  EAI/Transom Technologies, Ann Arbor, MI
  http://www.transom.com
  dway at mat.net, @eai.com